The Dangerous Prairies of Texas: The Western Dime Novel in Sweden, 1900-1908

The Dangerous Prairies of Texas:
The Western Dime Novel in Sweden,
19004908
ULF JONAS BJÖRK
In 1907 a Stockholm publishing firm called Svithiod introduced
Swedish readers to a quintessential American dime-novel hero,
Texas Jack. Dubbed "America's most famous Indian fighter" by
the publisher, this Western hero was to cast a long shadow over the
reading habits of young Swedish males: the stories of his feats were
reissued in the 1920s and in 1930, and some of them returned once
more in the early 1950s.1 Against that background, this study exam­ines
the content of the Texas Jack stories, and it also discusses their
role in the development in Sweden of a mass literature set in the
American West, a development in which the Svithiod publishing
company played a significant part.
The Texas Jack series was not Svithiod's first venture into pub­lishing
tales of the West, but a continuation of a tradition that had
begun with a publication called V i l d a V e s t e r n (The Wild West) seven
years earlier. That series, with its promise to readers of "highly inter­esting
Indian stories," had broken new ground by marrying an estab­lished
genre to methods of presentation and distribution pioneered
by others but not yet applied to reading matter for juveniles.2
The established genre that the stories in V i l d a V e s t e r n were part of
was the "Indian book." It had been a staple of the reading matter of
young Swedish males since the 1870s at least, when the newspaper
Stockholms Dagblad complained that "stories from America and ac­counts
of battles between settlers and the original inhabitants of the
land have undoubtedly appeared in numbers too large." The origins
of the genre lay even further back in time and can be traced to the
first translations into Swedish of the works of American novelist
James Fenimore Cooper, which appeared in the 1820s and early
1830s, in most instances only a few years after the books' initial
publication in America. Cooper's novels were reissued in the 1850s
166
and then appeared in new editions every decade after that.3 His
success spawned a host of imitators. Among those whose works reached
Sweden, a few—Robert Montgomery Bird, W i l l i am O. Stoddard,
and Edward Ellis—were Americans, but the great majority were Eu­ropeans,
with Britain's Frederick Marryat and Mayne Reid and France's
Gabriel Ferry and Gustave Aimard leading the way between 1840
and 1870.4 As the Indian book went through its heyday in the
1890s, however, German writers came to dominate, and it was thus
no coincidence that all but one of the seventeen authors of the V i l da
Vestern stories were from Germany. (The remaining one, Kristofer
Janson, was, judging from the nationality of his characters, Norwe­gian.)
A l l of the authors were, Svithiod assured its customers, "the
most prominent writers from abroad."5
If the content of Svithiod's first western title thus was not new,
the company's method of launching and distributing the series was,
and it amounted to a redefinition of Indian books that made them
more widely accessible, moved them decisively into the realm of
mass literature, and established them even more firmly as a specific
genre. To begin with, V i l d a Vestern was, apparently, the first series to
focus exclusively on the American West, as its title made clear.
Earlier series containing Indian tales had introduced them within the
framework of general adventure books, where they competed for the
readers' attention with sea stories and novels set in exotic locales
such as Africa.6
Even more innovative was the manner in which V i l d a Vestern was
distributed. Here, Svithiod borrowed an idea from a publication
called V i t t e r l e k , which had started in the early 1880s. V i t t e r l e k had
serialized novels for adults in a periodical format, giving the readers a
section of a longer work i n each issue. Following that model, the
stories of V i l d a Vestern were books in their own right that varied in
length between 95 and 130 pages. They were divided, however, into
pamphlets of 32 or 48 pages (depending on whether the issue was a
single or double) which appeared three or four times a month and
numbered 30 for the first series and 36 for the second. This publica­tion
method meant that an issue of V i l d a Vestern always ended after
the set number of pages, regardless of where in the original book
readers found themselves, which could be in the middle of a chapter.
167
On occasion, a pamphlet might contain the last few pages of one
book and the first few of another. To be able to follow the narrative,
then, it was necessary to buy every installment, and opportunity to
subscribe to the series made that possible. A further incentive was
the relatively low price: 25 ore for a single pamphlet, 50 for a double.7
Svithiod had clearly come up with an appealing idea, because
the series had barely concluded before the company announced that
"the great success that our collection of Indian stories called Vilda
Vestern has met with has caused us to continue the publication of
such tales of life in the Wild West."8 The new collection, consisting
of nine books, followed the content patterns of the first one, offering
the work of German authors writing about America. As before, the
series was issued in pamphlets that appeared almost weekly. The
second V i l d a V e s t e r n series lasted into 1901, but the following year
Svithiod took leave, temporarily, of the American West and offered
readers a series called the A d v e n t u r e L i b r a r y , which, judging from the
titles, consisted of tales of pirates and ghosts.
In 1904, however, the company returned to the American scene
with a series called B l a n d I n d i a n e r och Cowboys (Among Indians and
cowboys). Distributed in the same pamphlet form as the two V i l da
V e s t e r n collections, the new offering was different in that it had two
distinctive parts: "The former half of the work includes the Indian
stories. . . . The latter half is comprised of the cowboy stories, based
on real events, so thrilling that you can say without exaggeration
about them that no imaginary world of a poet can surpass reality."9
Shifting, within the series, from trappers patterned on Cooper's
works (in stories told by German writers) toward cowboys was a
significant move, and so was the claim that readers no longer were
reading fiction but accounts of real events. Both trends would be
even more clearly noticeable when Svithiod once more returned to
the West two years later.
This time, the series was not a collection of books by various
authors but a number of installments featuring the same protagonist:
William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo B i l l . 1 0 The connection to
real events, hinted at in B l a n d I n d i a n e r och C o w b o y s , was now even
stronger:
168
Buffalo Bill, whose position and name in civilian life is
Colonel W. F. Cody, has published an extremely interesting
autobiography. It is on the basis of this that the present
depictions of the eventful life of this remarkable man have
been created. They are thus altogether truthful, if somewhat
romanticized, and depict real events. . . . They bear out the
old adage that real life can exhibit far more suspenseful situ­ations
and complicated conditions than even the most bold
imagination is able to create.11
What had appeared in Swedish popular fiction was thus not only
a distinctly American hero, but also a peculiarly American literary
format, the dime novel.1 2 To maintain the illusion that readers were
given a factual autobiographical account, the series started with a
sketch of Cody's life.1 3 As it had with V i l d a Vestern, Svithiod soon
claimed that the launching of Buffalo Bills Äfventyr i V i l d a Västern had
been such a "great success" that it had prompted the publication of a
second series. It began in October 1906, seven months after the hero
had first been introduced.14
In fact, the Buffalo Bill series appears to have been so successful
that Svithiod decided to continue offering Western tales immediately
after Cody's adventures came to an end. Consequently, an announce­ment
was published in the last few Bill pamphlets that readers would
soon be given "a series of altogether unique accounts of life i n t he
w i l d e r n e s s i n t h e F a r W e s t during the time when 'the redskins' there
made their utmost to fight and annihilate 'the palefaces.'" Three titles
and seven years after the publisher had launched its first western title,
Swedish readers were introduced to Texas Jack.15
In number of pamphlets, Texas Jack was the most successful
Svithiod title of all, because it was issued in no fewer than three
series. Curiously, while there seems to be no doubt about the Ameri­can
origin of the tales of Buffalo Bill, the circumstances surrounding
the creation of Texas Jack's adventures are murkier. Like Cody, the
"real" Texas Jack, John Burwell Omohundro, was a scout whose
exploits had gained the attention of dime-novel authors, who pub­lished
stories with him as the hero in America. While some sources
claim that these did reach Sweden, author Knud Nielsen argues that
169
what Danish readers were
given were adventures cre­ated
in Germany, and the
close match between Dan­ish
and Swedish titles would
make his point applicable
to Sweden as well.1 6 Wher­ever
the stories originated,
however, they are clearly
modeled on the Buffalo Bill
series, using the same for­mat:
a hero-centered struc­ture
where the assumption
was that the reader was
given real-life accounts.
The two titles also share
other traits. Most of the sto­ries
reveal a geographical
location, although occasion­ally
the readers are informed
that Buffalo B i l l or Texas
Jack is merely "on the prairie."1 7 In both titles, the Southwest is the
most heavily favored setting: Texas, Arizona, and Utah are the set­tings
for 53 percent of the named locations in Buffalo Bill, while the
same three states plus New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada account
for 81 percent of the specified Texas Jack settings. As noted by
Ronald Fullerton in his study of Western fiction in Germany, some of
the geography occasionally is bizarre: in one of the Texas Jack stories,
Indiana and New Mexico share a border, while a Buffalo Bill adven­ture
has the hero crossing from Arizona into Wyoming.18
Even more noticeable is the generic nature of the scenery, which,
in essence, is reduced to four basic types. While the first two, moun­tains
and deserts, have a connection to the American Southwest, the
other two appear to be loans from earlier Indian tales. Thus, Bill and
Jack frequently find themselves in dense forests that seem taken out
of Cooper's American Northeast of the 1700s, and, as noted above,
170
they frequently cross a landscape that endlessly fascinated both East
Coast Americans and Europeans: the prairie, "the sea of grass."19
While the spatial location of the stories is made fairly clear, the
time period in which they occur is far vaguer. Only two of the
nineteen Buffalo Bill stories tell the reader when the adventure takes
place, and only one of the forty-four Texas Jack adventures does so.
Although the stories about Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack are cen­tered
around cowboy heroes and thus break with the focus of earlier
Indian books, Indians still play a prominent part in the adventures of
the two heroes. As with the descriptions of scenery, however, the
introduction of the Indians has a generic quality, with the same tribes
being used again and again. Seven different tribes appear in the
Buffalo Bill series, but three—Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche—
are the adversaries in 75 percent of the stories. In Texas Jack, the
total number of tribes is ten, but here, too, three tribes—Sioux,
Apache, and Cheyenne—are found in more than three-quarters of
the stories. The Sioux are particularly noteworthy for roaming far
away from their real-life homelands on the Northern Great Plains,
bedeviling Jack in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada.2 0
The treatment of the Indians is contradictory. One of the early
Buffalo Bill stories contains an inner-monologue passage where the
hero muses about the plight of the Native Americans:
Of a noble mind, brave and fearless and easily receptive
to instruction, the Indian might, had he been allowed to
coalesce with his white brethren and been treated by them
like a human being, have become a good citizen. . . . Indians
are by nature honest, true to their friends, and magnanimous.
It is clear, however, that the persecution that they have per­sistently
been subjected to has made them suspicious and
bitter. One often speaks of their vindictiveness, and it is true
that they often exact cruel and bloody revenge, but they
have reason to do so.
Civilization is a blessing to the earth, but a superior civi­lization
that expresses itself in brutal bullying of and violent
acts against another race is condemnable even if these acts
are committed by a nation that claims to be one of the most
171
civilized and liberal in the world.21
Despite this apparent sympathy for the Indians, however, Bill is,
in the same passage, referred to as "one of the most distinguished
Indian killers in America"; and it is said he thinks that "as things are,
there is nothing else to do but to continue the work that has begun,"
i.e., the extermination of the tribes. In the same vein, another story
has one of the characters offering Buffalo Bill the compliment that "a
Chicago butcher cannot slaughter a pig better than you slaughter
redskins."2 2 The Texas Jack series is even more sparse in its praise of
Indians, although Jack does note in one episode that "the Apache
are by nature noble and amicable, and because they are brave in
battle, they despise dishonest acts," and muses in another that, "as to
color, a good heart can beat in the breast of a red as well as a white
man."2 3 Far more often, however, his red adversaries are dismissed as
"devils," "dogs," "fiends," "beasts," and "rabble."2 4 Driving home the
hero's view of Indians is that he, like Buffalo Bill, kills scores of them
in every story.
Such killings are part of the overall undertone of brutality and
violence in both titles, particularly in Texas Jack. The protagonist of
Svithiod's most successful Western series has no compunctions when
it comes to ending the lives of his opponents and his way of doing so
is seldom particularly heroic.2 5 Thus, he frequently crushes the skulls
of his foes with the butt of his rifle or his tomahawk.2 6 In a story from
the first series, Jack slowly strangles the villain, ending the life "of one
of the maddest monsters of his time in a well-deserved manner."27
Another adventure ends with the hero forcing a Spaniard responsible
for stirring up the Apache to drink poison.2 8 In a couple of other
tales, Texas Jack uses proxies: an Indian ally is allowed to scalp the
villain alive in one scene, and he gives an Apache band (somewhat
improbably surfacing in California) permission to massacre the in­habitants
of a mining camp in another, leading Jack to the reflection
that the "extermination of the vile gang was not a reprehensible act,
as they had been a stain on the white race."2 9 On at least one
occasion, Texas Jack simply executes a group of his adversaries.30
It was, among other things, the level of violence that led to the
third Texas Jack series, published in 1908, becoming embroiled in a
172
debate that erupted late that year in Sweden over smutslitteratur
(gutter literature). According to one of its most dedicated oppo­nents,
Dagens N y h e t e r editor Anton Karlgren, such literature "lacks
value, is produced for speculation purposes only and panders to the
worst emotions and instincts of men."3 1 U l f Boëthius's thorough study
of the debate sees s m u t s l i t t e r a t u r as one of the first manifestations of a
popular culture borne by the mass media whose presence would be
more and more noticeable in Sweden as the twentieth century wore
on.3 2 He draws parallels between the pamphlets that upset the Swed­ish
establishment in 1908 and the inexpensive paperbacks that ap­peared
later in the century and notes that what held particular ap­peal
for prospective readers was that the stories were set in "the
USA, the land of the future."33
Most of the publications that drew fire from critics involved life,
particularly criminal life, in a thoroughly modern and, in Sweden,
still largely unfamiliar environment, the great cities of the eastern
United States. It was thus no coincidence that another name for
s m u t s l i t t e r a t u r was Nick C a r t e r - l i t t e r a t u r , named after one of the detec­tive
heroes of the offensive pamphlets. Still, the term also included
what Karlgren called "wildly fantastical adventures, taken from the
life of pirates and Indians," and when Dagens N y h e t e r listed publishers
engaged in generating this "river of filth," both Texas Jack and Buffalo
B i l l appeared among the titles.34
As to appearance, Boëthius describes s m u t s l i t t e r a t u r as consisting
of pamphlets that contained finished stories and enticed readers with
gaudily colored covers depicting sensational scenes. That character­ization
fits the third Texas Jack series exactly, as its launch had
prompted Svithiod to change the format it had used since launching
the V i l d a Vestern title in 1900.35 The generic covers were discarded in
favor of scenes unique to the story in each individual pamphlet, and
that story was no longer an installment but a completed tale.
In content, however, there are really no major differences be­tween
series 1 and 2 and series 3. The aspects discussed above—the
geographical vagueness, the generic Indian tribes, the high level of
violence—remain largely the same. Apparently, that was even more
true in the case of Buffalo Bill: the title castigated in 1908 was pub­lished
by a company in Malmö, and although no copies remain of
173
those pamphlets in Swedish libraries, a list of the titles suggests that
more than three-quarters of the stories were the same as those already
published by Svithiod in 1906. Clearly, as Boëthius argues, what
critics reacted to was the covers rather than the actual content.36
Western tales, moreover, held a peculiar position in the debate.
Buffalo Bill, Boëthius argues, "belonged to the benign category of
Indian books" and was thus less despicable to critics than the more
unfamiliar crime-story pamphlets. His point is supported by a report
in Dagens N y h e t e r about the activities at Kungsholmen elementary
school, where teachers were determined to do their part in the fight
against Nick Carter. Consequently, they had offered evening read­ings
of "fun stories," and although the books that were selected
leaned heavily toward the works of Jules Verne, they also included
the adventures of Buffalo B i l l . 37
Boëthius does not explain why he regards Buffalo Bill as "be­nign,"
but it is clear that the long-standing presence of Indian books
in Sweden was a major reason, and that presence surfaced repeatedly
in the Nick Carter debate. Marie Louise Gagner, a teacher who was
one of the most active crusaders against s m u t s l i t t e r a t u r , advocated
fighting it with "inexpensive editions of adventure literature suited
for boys," where Cooper was one of the preferred authors.3 8 Echoing
that assessment were interviews conducted by Dagens N y h e t e r , as the
paper sought to advise on reading suitable as a replacement for Nick
Carter. Three of the "authors and pedagogues" surveyed by the paper
recommended Cooper and other traditional tales of the West.39
Clearly, then, the adventures of Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack were
able to capitalize on the well-established popularity of Cooper's sto­ries
and of other Indian books and the familiarity of Swedish readers
with Western settings, storylines, and characters that these books had
worked to build over a period of more than half a century. Svithiod's
turn-of-the-century Western titles would, in turn, facilitate the ac­ceptance
of Hollywood cowboy films from the 1910s on, as well as
pave the way for comic books with western motifs in the mid-1950s
and for Westerns on Swedish television in the late 1960s.
Extending the perspective beyond fiction products with the
American West as a setting, it is clear that the long-standing pres­ence
of U.S. mass culture and media culture in countries such as
174
Sweden is a major part of the explanation of the current-day appeal
of American T V programs and theatrical films. As Canadian econo­mists
Colin Hoskins and Rolf Mirus note in their discussion of how
important the "low cultural discount" of U.S. television programs is
in their success as exports around the world, foreign audiences have,
over the years, been familiarized with the "fictional entertainment
values" of the United States.40
ENDNOTES
1. Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömde indianbekämpare (Stockholm: Bokförlaget
Svithiod, 1907); for the biography of the real Texas Jack, John Burwell
Omohundro (1846-1880), see Dan L. Thrapp, E n c y c l o p e d i a of Frontier Biography
(Glendale, Calif.: The Arthur H . Clark Company, 1988), vol. 2,1082-83; Cata­logs,
Royal Library, Stockholm, and LIBRIS. Buffalo Bill, Jack's predecessor in
Svithiod's pantheon of Western heroes, also proved long-lived: the Bill adven­tures
that were introduced at the turn of the century returned in new editions in
both the 1920s and the 1960s.
2. "Anmälan," back cover, Vilda Vestern, issue 5 (1900).
3. "De unga nybyggarne på Pampas." Stockholms Dagblad, 24 December 1872,
2; Catalog, Royal Library, Stockholm; Nordisk Familjebok, vol. 5 (Stockholm:
Nordisk Familjeboks förlags aktiebolag, 1906), 694. Modern scholars also credit
Cooper with inventing the Indian-book genre; see Göte Klingberg, Barn- och
ungdomsboken förr och n u (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 1968), 138.
4. Frederick Marryat, Nybyggarne i Canada: En berättelse för ungdom, Bibliothek
för b a r n och ungdom 13 (Stockholm: n.p., 1847); Frederick Marryat, Nybyggarne
i Canada: Läsning för ungdom (Göteborg: n.p., 1847); Robert Montgomery Bird,
R o l a n d Forrester's och hans systers Edithas sällsamma äfventyr b l a n d v i l d a r ne
(Stockholm: n.p., 1847); Mayne Reid, Dal-oasen i den A m e r i k a n s k a öknen: E n
utvandrarfamiljs underbara lefnadsöden, resor och färder (Stockholm: n.p., 1853);
Reid, D e unga flodfararne; eller Reseäfventyr i N o r d - A m e r i k a s vildmarker (Stockholm:
S. Flodin, 1860); Reid, Paradiset i öknen: Skildringar och händelser från A m e r i k as
prairier, urskogar och öknar (Stockholm: n.p., 1861); Reid, E n frivilligs äfventyr:
A m e r i k a n s k a rese- och krigsbilder (Stockholm: n.p., 1861); Ferry, Skogslöparen:
Skildring af lifvet i amerikanska vesterns ödemarker: Bearbetning för ungdom af S.S.
(Stockholm: L. J. Hiertas förlag, 1864); Aimard, Trappers i A r k a n s a s : R o m a n t i s ka
skildringar från N o r d - A m e r i k a s prairier (Stockholm: Fr. Swanström, 1862); Aimard,
Det stora fribytarbandet eller tigerjägaren: Berättelser från indianska öknen (Stockholm:
n.p., 1863). For a general discussion of European fiction dealing with the Ameri­can
West, see Ray A . Billington, "The Wild, Wild West through European
175
Eyes," A m e r i c a n History Illustrated 14 (August 1979): 16-23; and Gerald D. Nash,
"European Images of America: The West in Historical Perspective," Montana:
The Magazine of Western History 42 (Spring 1992): 2-16.
5. "Anmälan," back cover, Vilda Vestern, issue 5 (1900); the eight stories of
the first series were all written by authors with German names, and two authors,
Ludwig Anders (L. A . Western) and Eginhard von Barfus, were responsible for
half; the two were apparently known for works appealing to a juvenile reader­ship
and did not use the American West as the only exotic and attractive loca­tion
for adventures. Both also wrote novels set in South Africa. See Siegman
Itohl, ed., Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon (Berne and Munich: Francke Verlag, 1968),
vol. 1, 103, 265: Royal Library catalog.
6. A n indication of the broader scope of earlier series is that their titles were
more general, such as Favoritlektyr för ungdom (Favorite reading matter for youth)
(1870-85), Bibliotek för den mognare ungdomen (Library for mature youth) (1876-
84), Läsning för gossar (Reading for boys) (1891-95), and Äfventyrsböcker (Ad­venture
books) (1892-95); Svensk B o k - k a t a l o g 1866-75 (Stockholm:
Garantiföreningen för utgifvande af Svensk Bok-katalog, 1878), 66; Svensk Bok­k
a t a l o g j e m t e musikförteckning för åren 1 8 7 6 - 1 8 8 5 (Stockholm: Svenska
Bokförläggarföreningen, 1890), 30, 80; Svensk B o k - k a t a l o g j e m t e musikförteckning
för åren 1 8 8 6 - 1 8 9 5 (Stockholm: Svenska Bokförläggarföreningen, 1900), 25.
7. Vitterlek: tidskrift för skönlitteratur, 1881-87. Among Vitterlek's authors,
Alexandre Dumas dominated, accounting for nine of the twenty books, but the
list also included Charles Dickens and Daniel Defoe; interestingly, works by
Cooper and Aimard also appeared.
8. "Anmälan," Ny samling. Vilda Vestern, back cover, issue 4 (1900).
9. "Anmälan," Bland Indianer och C o w b o y s , issue 1 (1904); the cowboy part
consisted of one book, originally called Bland rödskinna och cowboys (redskin
and cowboy), by British author G. A. Henty, while the authors of the Indian
section remained German. Henty's work had already been published in book
form in 1893 by Wilhelm Bille; Royal Library catalog.
10. This "hero-centered" structure of the series had been pioneered in the
United States decades earlier; Ronald A . Fullerton, "Toward a Commercial Popu­lar
Culture in Germany: the Development of Pamphlet Fiction, 1871-1914,"
J o u r n a l of Social History, 12 (Summer 1979): 497.
11. "Anmälan," Buffalo Bills Äfventyr i Vilda Västern, back cover, issue 1
(1906).
12. Christine Bold, "Maleska's Revenge; or, The Dime Novel Tradition in
Popular Fiction," in Wanted Dead or Alive: The A m e r i c a n West in Popular C u l t u r e,
ed. Richard Aquila (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 25; Ulf Boëthius,
När Nick C a r t e r drevs på flykten: Kampen m o t "smutslitteraturen" i Sverige 1908-
1 9 0 9 (Stockholm; Gidlunds, 1989), 51.
176
13. "Buffalo Bill," in Buffalo Bills Äfventyr i Vilda Västern [1]: Bills dödsridt
genom det fientliga lägret (Stockholm: Svithiod, 1906), 1-9.
14- "Buffalo Bill berättar själf sina äfventyr," back cover, Buffalo Bills Äfventyr
i Vilda Västern 1, second series.
15. "Ur Texas Jacks egna uppteckningar," back cover, Buffalo Bills Äfventyr
i Vilda Västern 28-39.
16. Knud Nielsen, De gamle kulørte hæfter: Et pudsigt fænomen—og et af
kulturhistoriens oversete kapitler (Frederiksborg: by the author, 1983), 24; the lack
of references in Nielsen's book makes his claim somewhat less solid; Fullerton
(499) is more vague, but seems to imply that Texas Jack was a German creation;
among the sources claiming an American origin are two Swedish encyclopedias,
both naming Prentiss Ingraham as the author, as does Klinberg (144); "Texas
Jack," entry, Svensk Uppslagsbok (2nd ed., Malmö Förlagshuset Norden AB, 1957),
vol. 29; "Texas Jack," entry, Nationalencyklopedin (Höganäs: Bokförlaget Bra
Böcker, 1995), vol. 18. Thrapp (1082) maintains that Ned Buntline was the
author. A search of the OCLC bibliographic database revealed the existence of
four Texas Jack stories: Lone Star, Texas Jack; or Buffalo Bills Brother (New York:
R. M . De Witt, 1872); Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, the Prairie Rattler: or, The Q u e en
of the Wild Riders (New York: Beadle & Adams, 1884); Ned Buntline, Texas Jack,
the White King of the Pawnees (New York: Street & Smith, 1891); and Buffalo
Bill, Texas Jack, the Lasso King; or, The Robber Rangers of the Rio G r a n d e (New
York: Beadle & Adams, 1897).
17. Buffalo Bills äventyr i Vilda Västern [8]: Buffalo Bills vågsamma ridt, eller
poströfvarne på prärien; Buffalo Bills äventyr i Vilda Västern [ 1 0 ] : Buffalo Bill,
Västerns hjälte, eller hvad en graf dolde; Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda
indianbekämpare [1]: E n hjälte på sexton år; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda
indianbekämpare [2]: Korparne från San Francisco; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda
indianbekämpare [3]: Det röda spöket vid Fort Leaton; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest
berömda indianbekämpare [4]: Blodbadet i C a m p Lancaster.
18. Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda indianbekämpare [5]: Texas Jack som
detektiv; Buffalo Bills äventyr i Vilda Västern [ 1 8 ] : Buffalo Bills segertåg; Fullerton,
495.
19. See, for instance, En hjälte på sexton år, 31, 50; Det röda spöket, 2 9 ;
Blodbadet, 35; Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 2 , series 2 ]:
Milliontjufven från San F r a n c i s c o , 18; Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda
indianbekämpare [ 8 , series 2 ] : Indiantrohet, 12. The stories of the Vilda Vestern title
are in some ways even more vague, as they seldom mention specific locations.
20. Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 5 , series 2]: Trojas
ödeläggelse; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 1 2 , series 2]: Striden
med indianer under jorden; Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 1 ,
series 2 ] : H u r Texas Jack fann sin fader; in Vilda Vestern's first series, nine different
177
tribes are introduced, with the Comanche appearing most frequently (in five
stories), followed by the Apache (four) and the Sioux and Pawnee (two each);
cf. an 1885 comment in the Stockholm newspaper N y a Dagligt Allehanda that
the Comanche and the Apache were recognized "from the days of our youth,"
suggesting that the "celebrity" status of certain tribes had a long tradition;
"Litteratur," N y a Dagligt Allehanda, 12 December 1885, 2.
21. Buffalo Bills äventyr i Vilda Västern [6]: Buffalo Bill i dödsfara, etter Snokögas
ljudlösa signal, 15-16.
22. Buffalo Bill i dödsfara, 15; Buffalo Bills äventyr i Vilda Västern [2]: Buffalo
Bills beridna skarpskyttar, 96.
23. Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda indianbekämpare [7]: Guldgräfvarne
från A r i z o n a , 47; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda indianbekämpare [10]: Skalpen
med det blonda kvinnohåret, 20.
24. En hjälte på sexton år, 17, 19; Det röda spöket, 34; Blodbadet, 45; Texas
Jack, Amerikas mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 1 0 ] : D e n röda bruden, 37; Texas
Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömde indianbekämpare [ 7 , series 3]: Texas Jack gör 12 hundra
fångar, 20; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömde indianbekämpare [ 8 , series 3]: En
indiansk konungadotter, 13.
25. Boëthius (79) notes that, contrary to what the sensational covers sug­gested,
detective hero Nick Carter was loath to kill his opponents and seldom
used weapons or deadly force; on the other hand, Bold (25) stresses that the
Buffalo Bill stories were noteworthy for their violent content, particularly after
their authorship was turned over to Ingraham.
26. Blodbadet, 14, 56; Den röda bruden, 52; Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda
indianbekämpare [ 1 1 ] : Mormonernas hämnd, 54.
27. Blodbadet, 62
28. Guldgräfvarne, 59
29. Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 9 , series 2]: "Svarta
H a n d e n " i Texas, 55; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömde indianbekämpare [ 9 , series
3]: Nybyggarens testamente, 44
30. Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 1 4 , series 2 ]:
Dödsbrunnen, 55.
31. "Till strids mot Nick Carter!" Dagens Nyheter, 12 February 1909, B
edition, 2.
32. Boëthius, 11.
33. Ibid., 42, 40.
34. "Nick Carters triumftåg," Dagens Nyheter, 20 January 1909, A edition, 2;
cf. Algot Lindblom, "Nick Carter och skolorna," Svenska Dagbladet, 7 February
1909, 9; Boëthius (44, 47) also includes these two titles.
35. Boëthius, 42, 64.
36. Ibid., 67; "Buffalo Bill: Öfverste W. F. Cody," loose back cover, bound
178
with N i c k C a r t e r , A m e r i k a s störste detektiv (Malmö: Nick Carters-förlag, n.y.) in
Royal Library.
37. Boëthius, 56; "Äfventyrens värld på skolbänken," Dagens Nyheter, 18
March 1909, A edition, 3. Presumably, what the teachers read aloud was not the
series from Malmö but Cody's autobiography, translated into Swedish in 1902
and appearing as a proper book in the series C . W . K . Gleerups ungdomsböcker.
38. "Nick Carter och folkskolan," Dagens Nyheter, 21 January 1909, B edi­tion,
2.
39. "Hvarmed ersätta Nick Carter?" (Per Hallström), Dagens Nyheter, 31
March 1909, A edition, 3; "Ännu två uttalanden i enquêten: Hvarmed ersätta
Nick Carter?" (Ruben G:son Berg), Dagens Nyheter, 2 April 1909, A edition, 2;
"Två nya bidrag till enquêten Hvarmed Ersätta Nick Carter?" (Hugo Vallentin),
Dagens Nyheter, 4 April 1909, C edition, 1.
40. Hoskins and Mims, "Reasons for the U.S. Dominance of the Interna­tional
Trade in Television Programmes," M e d i a , Culture and Society 10 (1988):
504-6.

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

All rights held by the Swedish-American Historical Society. No part of this publication, except in the case of brief quotations, may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the editor and, where appropriate, the original author(s). For more information, please email the Society at info@swedishamericanhist.org

The Dangerous Prairies of Texas:
The Western Dime Novel in Sweden,
19004908
ULF JONAS BJÖRK
In 1907 a Stockholm publishing firm called Svithiod introduced
Swedish readers to a quintessential American dime-novel hero,
Texas Jack. Dubbed "America's most famous Indian fighter" by
the publisher, this Western hero was to cast a long shadow over the
reading habits of young Swedish males: the stories of his feats were
reissued in the 1920s and in 1930, and some of them returned once
more in the early 1950s.1 Against that background, this study exam­ines
the content of the Texas Jack stories, and it also discusses their
role in the development in Sweden of a mass literature set in the
American West, a development in which the Svithiod publishing
company played a significant part.
The Texas Jack series was not Svithiod's first venture into pub­lishing
tales of the West, but a continuation of a tradition that had
begun with a publication called V i l d a V e s t e r n (The Wild West) seven
years earlier. That series, with its promise to readers of "highly inter­esting
Indian stories," had broken new ground by marrying an estab­lished
genre to methods of presentation and distribution pioneered
by others but not yet applied to reading matter for juveniles.2
The established genre that the stories in V i l d a V e s t e r n were part of
was the "Indian book." It had been a staple of the reading matter of
young Swedish males since the 1870s at least, when the newspaper
Stockholms Dagblad complained that "stories from America and ac­counts
of battles between settlers and the original inhabitants of the
land have undoubtedly appeared in numbers too large." The origins
of the genre lay even further back in time and can be traced to the
first translations into Swedish of the works of American novelist
James Fenimore Cooper, which appeared in the 1820s and early
1830s, in most instances only a few years after the books' initial
publication in America. Cooper's novels were reissued in the 1850s
166
and then appeared in new editions every decade after that.3 His
success spawned a host of imitators. Among those whose works reached
Sweden, a few—Robert Montgomery Bird, W i l l i am O. Stoddard,
and Edward Ellis—were Americans, but the great majority were Eu­ropeans,
with Britain's Frederick Marryat and Mayne Reid and France's
Gabriel Ferry and Gustave Aimard leading the way between 1840
and 1870.4 As the Indian book went through its heyday in the
1890s, however, German writers came to dominate, and it was thus
no coincidence that all but one of the seventeen authors of the V i l da
Vestern stories were from Germany. (The remaining one, Kristofer
Janson, was, judging from the nationality of his characters, Norwe­gian.)
A l l of the authors were, Svithiod assured its customers, "the
most prominent writers from abroad."5
If the content of Svithiod's first western title thus was not new,
the company's method of launching and distributing the series was,
and it amounted to a redefinition of Indian books that made them
more widely accessible, moved them decisively into the realm of
mass literature, and established them even more firmly as a specific
genre. To begin with, V i l d a Vestern was, apparently, the first series to
focus exclusively on the American West, as its title made clear.
Earlier series containing Indian tales had introduced them within the
framework of general adventure books, where they competed for the
readers' attention with sea stories and novels set in exotic locales
such as Africa.6
Even more innovative was the manner in which V i l d a Vestern was
distributed. Here, Svithiod borrowed an idea from a publication
called V i t t e r l e k , which had started in the early 1880s. V i t t e r l e k had
serialized novels for adults in a periodical format, giving the readers a
section of a longer work i n each issue. Following that model, the
stories of V i l d a Vestern were books in their own right that varied in
length between 95 and 130 pages. They were divided, however, into
pamphlets of 32 or 48 pages (depending on whether the issue was a
single or double) which appeared three or four times a month and
numbered 30 for the first series and 36 for the second. This publica­tion
method meant that an issue of V i l d a Vestern always ended after
the set number of pages, regardless of where in the original book
readers found themselves, which could be in the middle of a chapter.
167
On occasion, a pamphlet might contain the last few pages of one
book and the first few of another. To be able to follow the narrative,
then, it was necessary to buy every installment, and opportunity to
subscribe to the series made that possible. A further incentive was
the relatively low price: 25 ore for a single pamphlet, 50 for a double.7
Svithiod had clearly come up with an appealing idea, because
the series had barely concluded before the company announced that
"the great success that our collection of Indian stories called Vilda
Vestern has met with has caused us to continue the publication of
such tales of life in the Wild West."8 The new collection, consisting
of nine books, followed the content patterns of the first one, offering
the work of German authors writing about America. As before, the
series was issued in pamphlets that appeared almost weekly. The
second V i l d a V e s t e r n series lasted into 1901, but the following year
Svithiod took leave, temporarily, of the American West and offered
readers a series called the A d v e n t u r e L i b r a r y , which, judging from the
titles, consisted of tales of pirates and ghosts.
In 1904, however, the company returned to the American scene
with a series called B l a n d I n d i a n e r och Cowboys (Among Indians and
cowboys). Distributed in the same pamphlet form as the two V i l da
V e s t e r n collections, the new offering was different in that it had two
distinctive parts: "The former half of the work includes the Indian
stories. . . . The latter half is comprised of the cowboy stories, based
on real events, so thrilling that you can say without exaggeration
about them that no imaginary world of a poet can surpass reality."9
Shifting, within the series, from trappers patterned on Cooper's
works (in stories told by German writers) toward cowboys was a
significant move, and so was the claim that readers no longer were
reading fiction but accounts of real events. Both trends would be
even more clearly noticeable when Svithiod once more returned to
the West two years later.
This time, the series was not a collection of books by various
authors but a number of installments featuring the same protagonist:
William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo B i l l . 1 0 The connection to
real events, hinted at in B l a n d I n d i a n e r och C o w b o y s , was now even
stronger:
168
Buffalo Bill, whose position and name in civilian life is
Colonel W. F. Cody, has published an extremely interesting
autobiography. It is on the basis of this that the present
depictions of the eventful life of this remarkable man have
been created. They are thus altogether truthful, if somewhat
romanticized, and depict real events. . . . They bear out the
old adage that real life can exhibit far more suspenseful situ­ations
and complicated conditions than even the most bold
imagination is able to create.11
What had appeared in Swedish popular fiction was thus not only
a distinctly American hero, but also a peculiarly American literary
format, the dime novel.1 2 To maintain the illusion that readers were
given a factual autobiographical account, the series started with a
sketch of Cody's life.1 3 As it had with V i l d a Vestern, Svithiod soon
claimed that the launching of Buffalo Bills Äfventyr i V i l d a Västern had
been such a "great success" that it had prompted the publication of a
second series. It began in October 1906, seven months after the hero
had first been introduced.14
In fact, the Buffalo Bill series appears to have been so successful
that Svithiod decided to continue offering Western tales immediately
after Cody's adventures came to an end. Consequently, an announce­ment
was published in the last few Bill pamphlets that readers would
soon be given "a series of altogether unique accounts of life i n t he
w i l d e r n e s s i n t h e F a r W e s t during the time when 'the redskins' there
made their utmost to fight and annihilate 'the palefaces.'" Three titles
and seven years after the publisher had launched its first western title,
Swedish readers were introduced to Texas Jack.15
In number of pamphlets, Texas Jack was the most successful
Svithiod title of all, because it was issued in no fewer than three
series. Curiously, while there seems to be no doubt about the Ameri­can
origin of the tales of Buffalo Bill, the circumstances surrounding
the creation of Texas Jack's adventures are murkier. Like Cody, the
"real" Texas Jack, John Burwell Omohundro, was a scout whose
exploits had gained the attention of dime-novel authors, who pub­lished
stories with him as the hero in America. While some sources
claim that these did reach Sweden, author Knud Nielsen argues that
169
what Danish readers were
given were adventures cre­ated
in Germany, and the
close match between Dan­ish
and Swedish titles would
make his point applicable
to Sweden as well.1 6 Wher­ever
the stories originated,
however, they are clearly
modeled on the Buffalo Bill
series, using the same for­mat:
a hero-centered struc­ture
where the assumption
was that the reader was
given real-life accounts.
The two titles also share
other traits. Most of the sto­ries
reveal a geographical
location, although occasion­ally
the readers are informed
that Buffalo B i l l or Texas
Jack is merely "on the prairie."1 7 In both titles, the Southwest is the
most heavily favored setting: Texas, Arizona, and Utah are the set­tings
for 53 percent of the named locations in Buffalo Bill, while the
same three states plus New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada account
for 81 percent of the specified Texas Jack settings. As noted by
Ronald Fullerton in his study of Western fiction in Germany, some of
the geography occasionally is bizarre: in one of the Texas Jack stories,
Indiana and New Mexico share a border, while a Buffalo Bill adven­ture
has the hero crossing from Arizona into Wyoming.18
Even more noticeable is the generic nature of the scenery, which,
in essence, is reduced to four basic types. While the first two, moun­tains
and deserts, have a connection to the American Southwest, the
other two appear to be loans from earlier Indian tales. Thus, Bill and
Jack frequently find themselves in dense forests that seem taken out
of Cooper's American Northeast of the 1700s, and, as noted above,
170
they frequently cross a landscape that endlessly fascinated both East
Coast Americans and Europeans: the prairie, "the sea of grass."19
While the spatial location of the stories is made fairly clear, the
time period in which they occur is far vaguer. Only two of the
nineteen Buffalo Bill stories tell the reader when the adventure takes
place, and only one of the forty-four Texas Jack adventures does so.
Although the stories about Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack are cen­tered
around cowboy heroes and thus break with the focus of earlier
Indian books, Indians still play a prominent part in the adventures of
the two heroes. As with the descriptions of scenery, however, the
introduction of the Indians has a generic quality, with the same tribes
being used again and again. Seven different tribes appear in the
Buffalo Bill series, but three—Sioux, Cheyenne, and Comanche—
are the adversaries in 75 percent of the stories. In Texas Jack, the
total number of tribes is ten, but here, too, three tribes—Sioux,
Apache, and Cheyenne—are found in more than three-quarters of
the stories. The Sioux are particularly noteworthy for roaming far
away from their real-life homelands on the Northern Great Plains,
bedeviling Jack in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada.2 0
The treatment of the Indians is contradictory. One of the early
Buffalo Bill stories contains an inner-monologue passage where the
hero muses about the plight of the Native Americans:
Of a noble mind, brave and fearless and easily receptive
to instruction, the Indian might, had he been allowed to
coalesce with his white brethren and been treated by them
like a human being, have become a good citizen. . . . Indians
are by nature honest, true to their friends, and magnanimous.
It is clear, however, that the persecution that they have per­sistently
been subjected to has made them suspicious and
bitter. One often speaks of their vindictiveness, and it is true
that they often exact cruel and bloody revenge, but they
have reason to do so.
Civilization is a blessing to the earth, but a superior civi­lization
that expresses itself in brutal bullying of and violent
acts against another race is condemnable even if these acts
are committed by a nation that claims to be one of the most
171
civilized and liberal in the world.21
Despite this apparent sympathy for the Indians, however, Bill is,
in the same passage, referred to as "one of the most distinguished
Indian killers in America"; and it is said he thinks that "as things are,
there is nothing else to do but to continue the work that has begun,"
i.e., the extermination of the tribes. In the same vein, another story
has one of the characters offering Buffalo Bill the compliment that "a
Chicago butcher cannot slaughter a pig better than you slaughter
redskins."2 2 The Texas Jack series is even more sparse in its praise of
Indians, although Jack does note in one episode that "the Apache
are by nature noble and amicable, and because they are brave in
battle, they despise dishonest acts," and muses in another that, "as to
color, a good heart can beat in the breast of a red as well as a white
man."2 3 Far more often, however, his red adversaries are dismissed as
"devils," "dogs," "fiends," "beasts," and "rabble."2 4 Driving home the
hero's view of Indians is that he, like Buffalo Bill, kills scores of them
in every story.
Such killings are part of the overall undertone of brutality and
violence in both titles, particularly in Texas Jack. The protagonist of
Svithiod's most successful Western series has no compunctions when
it comes to ending the lives of his opponents and his way of doing so
is seldom particularly heroic.2 5 Thus, he frequently crushes the skulls
of his foes with the butt of his rifle or his tomahawk.2 6 In a story from
the first series, Jack slowly strangles the villain, ending the life "of one
of the maddest monsters of his time in a well-deserved manner."27
Another adventure ends with the hero forcing a Spaniard responsible
for stirring up the Apache to drink poison.2 8 In a couple of other
tales, Texas Jack uses proxies: an Indian ally is allowed to scalp the
villain alive in one scene, and he gives an Apache band (somewhat
improbably surfacing in California) permission to massacre the in­habitants
of a mining camp in another, leading Jack to the reflection
that the "extermination of the vile gang was not a reprehensible act,
as they had been a stain on the white race."2 9 On at least one
occasion, Texas Jack simply executes a group of his adversaries.30
It was, among other things, the level of violence that led to the
third Texas Jack series, published in 1908, becoming embroiled in a
172
debate that erupted late that year in Sweden over smutslitteratur
(gutter literature). According to one of its most dedicated oppo­nents,
Dagens N y h e t e r editor Anton Karlgren, such literature "lacks
value, is produced for speculation purposes only and panders to the
worst emotions and instincts of men."3 1 U l f Boëthius's thorough study
of the debate sees s m u t s l i t t e r a t u r as one of the first manifestations of a
popular culture borne by the mass media whose presence would be
more and more noticeable in Sweden as the twentieth century wore
on.3 2 He draws parallels between the pamphlets that upset the Swed­ish
establishment in 1908 and the inexpensive paperbacks that ap­peared
later in the century and notes that what held particular ap­peal
for prospective readers was that the stories were set in "the
USA, the land of the future."33
Most of the publications that drew fire from critics involved life,
particularly criminal life, in a thoroughly modern and, in Sweden,
still largely unfamiliar environment, the great cities of the eastern
United States. It was thus no coincidence that another name for
s m u t s l i t t e r a t u r was Nick C a r t e r - l i t t e r a t u r , named after one of the detec­tive
heroes of the offensive pamphlets. Still, the term also included
what Karlgren called "wildly fantastical adventures, taken from the
life of pirates and Indians," and when Dagens N y h e t e r listed publishers
engaged in generating this "river of filth," both Texas Jack and Buffalo
B i l l appeared among the titles.34
As to appearance, Boëthius describes s m u t s l i t t e r a t u r as consisting
of pamphlets that contained finished stories and enticed readers with
gaudily colored covers depicting sensational scenes. That character­ization
fits the third Texas Jack series exactly, as its launch had
prompted Svithiod to change the format it had used since launching
the V i l d a Vestern title in 1900.35 The generic covers were discarded in
favor of scenes unique to the story in each individual pamphlet, and
that story was no longer an installment but a completed tale.
In content, however, there are really no major differences be­tween
series 1 and 2 and series 3. The aspects discussed above—the
geographical vagueness, the generic Indian tribes, the high level of
violence—remain largely the same. Apparently, that was even more
true in the case of Buffalo Bill: the title castigated in 1908 was pub­lished
by a company in Malmö, and although no copies remain of
173
those pamphlets in Swedish libraries, a list of the titles suggests that
more than three-quarters of the stories were the same as those already
published by Svithiod in 1906. Clearly, as Boëthius argues, what
critics reacted to was the covers rather than the actual content.36
Western tales, moreover, held a peculiar position in the debate.
Buffalo Bill, Boëthius argues, "belonged to the benign category of
Indian books" and was thus less despicable to critics than the more
unfamiliar crime-story pamphlets. His point is supported by a report
in Dagens N y h e t e r about the activities at Kungsholmen elementary
school, where teachers were determined to do their part in the fight
against Nick Carter. Consequently, they had offered evening read­ings
of "fun stories," and although the books that were selected
leaned heavily toward the works of Jules Verne, they also included
the adventures of Buffalo B i l l . 37
Boëthius does not explain why he regards Buffalo Bill as "be­nign,"
but it is clear that the long-standing presence of Indian books
in Sweden was a major reason, and that presence surfaced repeatedly
in the Nick Carter debate. Marie Louise Gagner, a teacher who was
one of the most active crusaders against s m u t s l i t t e r a t u r , advocated
fighting it with "inexpensive editions of adventure literature suited
for boys," where Cooper was one of the preferred authors.3 8 Echoing
that assessment were interviews conducted by Dagens N y h e t e r , as the
paper sought to advise on reading suitable as a replacement for Nick
Carter. Three of the "authors and pedagogues" surveyed by the paper
recommended Cooper and other traditional tales of the West.39
Clearly, then, the adventures of Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack were
able to capitalize on the well-established popularity of Cooper's sto­ries
and of other Indian books and the familiarity of Swedish readers
with Western settings, storylines, and characters that these books had
worked to build over a period of more than half a century. Svithiod's
turn-of-the-century Western titles would, in turn, facilitate the ac­ceptance
of Hollywood cowboy films from the 1910s on, as well as
pave the way for comic books with western motifs in the mid-1950s
and for Westerns on Swedish television in the late 1960s.
Extending the perspective beyond fiction products with the
American West as a setting, it is clear that the long-standing pres­ence
of U.S. mass culture and media culture in countries such as
174
Sweden is a major part of the explanation of the current-day appeal
of American T V programs and theatrical films. As Canadian econo­mists
Colin Hoskins and Rolf Mirus note in their discussion of how
important the "low cultural discount" of U.S. television programs is
in their success as exports around the world, foreign audiences have,
over the years, been familiarized with the "fictional entertainment
values" of the United States.40
ENDNOTES
1. Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömde indianbekämpare (Stockholm: Bokförlaget
Svithiod, 1907); for the biography of the real Texas Jack, John Burwell
Omohundro (1846-1880), see Dan L. Thrapp, E n c y c l o p e d i a of Frontier Biography
(Glendale, Calif.: The Arthur H . Clark Company, 1988), vol. 2,1082-83; Cata­logs,
Royal Library, Stockholm, and LIBRIS. Buffalo Bill, Jack's predecessor in
Svithiod's pantheon of Western heroes, also proved long-lived: the Bill adven­tures
that were introduced at the turn of the century returned in new editions in
both the 1920s and the 1960s.
2. "Anmälan," back cover, Vilda Vestern, issue 5 (1900).
3. "De unga nybyggarne på Pampas." Stockholms Dagblad, 24 December 1872,
2; Catalog, Royal Library, Stockholm; Nordisk Familjebok, vol. 5 (Stockholm:
Nordisk Familjeboks förlags aktiebolag, 1906), 694. Modern scholars also credit
Cooper with inventing the Indian-book genre; see Göte Klingberg, Barn- och
ungdomsboken förr och n u (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 1968), 138.
4. Frederick Marryat, Nybyggarne i Canada: En berättelse för ungdom, Bibliothek
för b a r n och ungdom 13 (Stockholm: n.p., 1847); Frederick Marryat, Nybyggarne
i Canada: Läsning för ungdom (Göteborg: n.p., 1847); Robert Montgomery Bird,
R o l a n d Forrester's och hans systers Edithas sällsamma äfventyr b l a n d v i l d a r ne
(Stockholm: n.p., 1847); Mayne Reid, Dal-oasen i den A m e r i k a n s k a öknen: E n
utvandrarfamiljs underbara lefnadsöden, resor och färder (Stockholm: n.p., 1853);
Reid, D e unga flodfararne; eller Reseäfventyr i N o r d - A m e r i k a s vildmarker (Stockholm:
S. Flodin, 1860); Reid, Paradiset i öknen: Skildringar och händelser från A m e r i k as
prairier, urskogar och öknar (Stockholm: n.p., 1861); Reid, E n frivilligs äfventyr:
A m e r i k a n s k a rese- och krigsbilder (Stockholm: n.p., 1861); Ferry, Skogslöparen:
Skildring af lifvet i amerikanska vesterns ödemarker: Bearbetning för ungdom af S.S.
(Stockholm: L. J. Hiertas förlag, 1864); Aimard, Trappers i A r k a n s a s : R o m a n t i s ka
skildringar från N o r d - A m e r i k a s prairier (Stockholm: Fr. Swanström, 1862); Aimard,
Det stora fribytarbandet eller tigerjägaren: Berättelser från indianska öknen (Stockholm:
n.p., 1863). For a general discussion of European fiction dealing with the Ameri­can
West, see Ray A . Billington, "The Wild, Wild West through European
175
Eyes," A m e r i c a n History Illustrated 14 (August 1979): 16-23; and Gerald D. Nash,
"European Images of America: The West in Historical Perspective," Montana:
The Magazine of Western History 42 (Spring 1992): 2-16.
5. "Anmälan," back cover, Vilda Vestern, issue 5 (1900); the eight stories of
the first series were all written by authors with German names, and two authors,
Ludwig Anders (L. A . Western) and Eginhard von Barfus, were responsible for
half; the two were apparently known for works appealing to a juvenile reader­ship
and did not use the American West as the only exotic and attractive loca­tion
for adventures. Both also wrote novels set in South Africa. See Siegman
Itohl, ed., Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon (Berne and Munich: Francke Verlag, 1968),
vol. 1, 103, 265: Royal Library catalog.
6. A n indication of the broader scope of earlier series is that their titles were
more general, such as Favoritlektyr för ungdom (Favorite reading matter for youth)
(1870-85), Bibliotek för den mognare ungdomen (Library for mature youth) (1876-
84), Läsning för gossar (Reading for boys) (1891-95), and Äfventyrsböcker (Ad­venture
books) (1892-95); Svensk B o k - k a t a l o g 1866-75 (Stockholm:
Garantiföreningen för utgifvande af Svensk Bok-katalog, 1878), 66; Svensk Bok­k
a t a l o g j e m t e musikförteckning för åren 1 8 7 6 - 1 8 8 5 (Stockholm: Svenska
Bokförläggarföreningen, 1890), 30, 80; Svensk B o k - k a t a l o g j e m t e musikförteckning
för åren 1 8 8 6 - 1 8 9 5 (Stockholm: Svenska Bokförläggarföreningen, 1900), 25.
7. Vitterlek: tidskrift för skönlitteratur, 1881-87. Among Vitterlek's authors,
Alexandre Dumas dominated, accounting for nine of the twenty books, but the
list also included Charles Dickens and Daniel Defoe; interestingly, works by
Cooper and Aimard also appeared.
8. "Anmälan," Ny samling. Vilda Vestern, back cover, issue 4 (1900).
9. "Anmälan," Bland Indianer och C o w b o y s , issue 1 (1904); the cowboy part
consisted of one book, originally called Bland rödskinna och cowboys (redskin
and cowboy), by British author G. A. Henty, while the authors of the Indian
section remained German. Henty's work had already been published in book
form in 1893 by Wilhelm Bille; Royal Library catalog.
10. This "hero-centered" structure of the series had been pioneered in the
United States decades earlier; Ronald A . Fullerton, "Toward a Commercial Popu­lar
Culture in Germany: the Development of Pamphlet Fiction, 1871-1914,"
J o u r n a l of Social History, 12 (Summer 1979): 497.
11. "Anmälan," Buffalo Bills Äfventyr i Vilda Västern, back cover, issue 1
(1906).
12. Christine Bold, "Maleska's Revenge; or, The Dime Novel Tradition in
Popular Fiction," in Wanted Dead or Alive: The A m e r i c a n West in Popular C u l t u r e,
ed. Richard Aquila (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 25; Ulf Boëthius,
När Nick C a r t e r drevs på flykten: Kampen m o t "smutslitteraturen" i Sverige 1908-
1 9 0 9 (Stockholm; Gidlunds, 1989), 51.
176
13. "Buffalo Bill," in Buffalo Bills Äfventyr i Vilda Västern [1]: Bills dödsridt
genom det fientliga lägret (Stockholm: Svithiod, 1906), 1-9.
14- "Buffalo Bill berättar själf sina äfventyr," back cover, Buffalo Bills Äfventyr
i Vilda Västern 1, second series.
15. "Ur Texas Jacks egna uppteckningar," back cover, Buffalo Bills Äfventyr
i Vilda Västern 28-39.
16. Knud Nielsen, De gamle kulørte hæfter: Et pudsigt fænomen—og et af
kulturhistoriens oversete kapitler (Frederiksborg: by the author, 1983), 24; the lack
of references in Nielsen's book makes his claim somewhat less solid; Fullerton
(499) is more vague, but seems to imply that Texas Jack was a German creation;
among the sources claiming an American origin are two Swedish encyclopedias,
both naming Prentiss Ingraham as the author, as does Klinberg (144); "Texas
Jack," entry, Svensk Uppslagsbok (2nd ed., Malmö Förlagshuset Norden AB, 1957),
vol. 29; "Texas Jack," entry, Nationalencyklopedin (Höganäs: Bokförlaget Bra
Böcker, 1995), vol. 18. Thrapp (1082) maintains that Ned Buntline was the
author. A search of the OCLC bibliographic database revealed the existence of
four Texas Jack stories: Lone Star, Texas Jack; or Buffalo Bills Brother (New York:
R. M . De Witt, 1872); Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, the Prairie Rattler: or, The Q u e en
of the Wild Riders (New York: Beadle & Adams, 1884); Ned Buntline, Texas Jack,
the White King of the Pawnees (New York: Street & Smith, 1891); and Buffalo
Bill, Texas Jack, the Lasso King; or, The Robber Rangers of the Rio G r a n d e (New
York: Beadle & Adams, 1897).
17. Buffalo Bills äventyr i Vilda Västern [8]: Buffalo Bills vågsamma ridt, eller
poströfvarne på prärien; Buffalo Bills äventyr i Vilda Västern [ 1 0 ] : Buffalo Bill,
Västerns hjälte, eller hvad en graf dolde; Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda
indianbekämpare [1]: E n hjälte på sexton år; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda
indianbekämpare [2]: Korparne från San Francisco; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda
indianbekämpare [3]: Det röda spöket vid Fort Leaton; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest
berömda indianbekämpare [4]: Blodbadet i C a m p Lancaster.
18. Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda indianbekämpare [5]: Texas Jack som
detektiv; Buffalo Bills äventyr i Vilda Västern [ 1 8 ] : Buffalo Bills segertåg; Fullerton,
495.
19. See, for instance, En hjälte på sexton år, 31, 50; Det röda spöket, 2 9 ;
Blodbadet, 35; Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 2 , series 2 ]:
Milliontjufven från San F r a n c i s c o , 18; Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda
indianbekämpare [ 8 , series 2 ] : Indiantrohet, 12. The stories of the Vilda Vestern title
are in some ways even more vague, as they seldom mention specific locations.
20. Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 5 , series 2]: Trojas
ödeläggelse; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 1 2 , series 2]: Striden
med indianer under jorden; Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 1 ,
series 2 ] : H u r Texas Jack fann sin fader; in Vilda Vestern's first series, nine different
177
tribes are introduced, with the Comanche appearing most frequently (in five
stories), followed by the Apache (four) and the Sioux and Pawnee (two each);
cf. an 1885 comment in the Stockholm newspaper N y a Dagligt Allehanda that
the Comanche and the Apache were recognized "from the days of our youth,"
suggesting that the "celebrity" status of certain tribes had a long tradition;
"Litteratur," N y a Dagligt Allehanda, 12 December 1885, 2.
21. Buffalo Bills äventyr i Vilda Västern [6]: Buffalo Bill i dödsfara, etter Snokögas
ljudlösa signal, 15-16.
22. Buffalo Bill i dödsfara, 15; Buffalo Bills äventyr i Vilda Västern [2]: Buffalo
Bills beridna skarpskyttar, 96.
23. Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda indianbekämpare [7]: Guldgräfvarne
från A r i z o n a , 47; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda indianbekämpare [10]: Skalpen
med det blonda kvinnohåret, 20.
24. En hjälte på sexton år, 17, 19; Det röda spöket, 34; Blodbadet, 45; Texas
Jack, Amerikas mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 1 0 ] : D e n röda bruden, 37; Texas
Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömde indianbekämpare [ 7 , series 3]: Texas Jack gör 12 hundra
fångar, 20; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömde indianbekämpare [ 8 , series 3]: En
indiansk konungadotter, 13.
25. Boëthius (79) notes that, contrary to what the sensational covers sug­gested,
detective hero Nick Carter was loath to kill his opponents and seldom
used weapons or deadly force; on the other hand, Bold (25) stresses that the
Buffalo Bill stories were noteworthy for their violent content, particularly after
their authorship was turned over to Ingraham.
26. Blodbadet, 14, 56; Den röda bruden, 52; Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda
indianbekämpare [ 1 1 ] : Mormonernas hämnd, 54.
27. Blodbadet, 62
28. Guldgräfvarne, 59
29. Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 9 , series 2]: "Svarta
H a n d e n " i Texas, 55; Texas Jack, Amerikas mest berömde indianbekämpare [ 9 , series
3]: Nybyggarens testamente, 44
30. Texas Jack, A m e r i k a s mest berömda indianbekämpare [ 1 4 , series 2 ]:
Dödsbrunnen, 55.
31. "Till strids mot Nick Carter!" Dagens Nyheter, 12 February 1909, B
edition, 2.
32. Boëthius, 11.
33. Ibid., 42, 40.
34. "Nick Carters triumftåg," Dagens Nyheter, 20 January 1909, A edition, 2;
cf. Algot Lindblom, "Nick Carter och skolorna," Svenska Dagbladet, 7 February
1909, 9; Boëthius (44, 47) also includes these two titles.
35. Boëthius, 42, 64.
36. Ibid., 67; "Buffalo Bill: Öfverste W. F. Cody," loose back cover, bound
178
with N i c k C a r t e r , A m e r i k a s störste detektiv (Malmö: Nick Carters-förlag, n.y.) in
Royal Library.
37. Boëthius, 56; "Äfventyrens värld på skolbänken," Dagens Nyheter, 18
March 1909, A edition, 3. Presumably, what the teachers read aloud was not the
series from Malmö but Cody's autobiography, translated into Swedish in 1902
and appearing as a proper book in the series C . W . K . Gleerups ungdomsböcker.
38. "Nick Carter och folkskolan," Dagens Nyheter, 21 January 1909, B edi­tion,
2.
39. "Hvarmed ersätta Nick Carter?" (Per Hallström), Dagens Nyheter, 31
March 1909, A edition, 3; "Ännu två uttalanden i enquêten: Hvarmed ersätta
Nick Carter?" (Ruben G:son Berg), Dagens Nyheter, 2 April 1909, A edition, 2;
"Två nya bidrag till enquêten Hvarmed Ersätta Nick Carter?" (Hugo Vallentin),
Dagens Nyheter, 4 April 1909, C edition, 1.
40. Hoskins and Mims, "Reasons for the U.S. Dominance of the Interna­tional
Trade in Television Programmes," M e d i a , Culture and Society 10 (1988):
504-6.